Science is the opposite of religion. Right? No! Wrong! Religion is always
trying to infiltrate into religion. Sometimes it succeeds. For instance,
in the Big Bang theory.

Today it is almost unanimous among the orthodox astronomers and astrophysics
that the world was created some 12 billions ago from a magnificent explosion
of a primodial atom. In a few seconds, as the theory goes, all the universe
was created from this primordial explosion. From the energy of this fantastic
explosion all matter has been created, according to Einstein's theory that
matter is energy and vice-versa. Even space and time have been created
by this explosion.

There are some astronomers, as Fred Hoyle, Thomas Gold and Herman Bondi,
that don't accept the Big Bang theory. They rather believe in a steady-state
universe. Regretfully they are the losers in the academic establishment.

To some nonbelievers, like me, the Big Bang theory seems just a disguised
version of the Bible creation, when Jehovah said "Fiat Lux",
and the universe was created. So far as I am concerned, in spite of the
beautiful mathematical formulas of the scholars, I can't accept that this
indescribably immense universe has been originated from a single atom (or
from a fireball the size of a baseball), all of a sudden, out of nothing.
I would rather believe in Santa Claus.

How did such strange idea infiltrate into science? Science began some
centuries before Christ, in Classical Greece, when some brilliant minds
began to analyse the world free from the shackles of religion. Pitagoras
discovered that mathematics rule the world. Leucippus and Democritus figured
out that all matter is made of atoms. Hippocrates and Galen robbed Medicine
from the priests. Aristaco de Samos found out that the Earth revolves around
the Sun and not otherwise. Another Greek scholar measured the distance
from the Earth to the Moon and missed by only 200 kilometers. Socrates,
Plato and Aristotle abandoned the fables of Greek Mythology in favor of
secular Philosophy.

Unfortunately this wonderful beginning was checked by the wide acceptance
of the Christian cosmology based in the Bible. Europe remained in the intellectual
darkness of Christendom for more than a millennium. The world was only
to be awakened by the study of the pagan Greek classics (Renaissance and
Humanism).

During more than a millennium the Roman Church has been accustomed to
being owner of the truth. The Bible and the pope were declared infallible
and those who dared to disagree were considered heretics and condemned
to terrible tortures before being sent to the stake. This happened, among
thousands, to Giordano Bruno, in the year 1600.

The Church didn't like when, after the Renaissance and after the religious
liberty provided by the Protestant revolution, science exploded, explaining
all the phenomena of nature without the help of the Bible, not to say of
a god. Much to the contrary! Among dozens of discoveries that defied the
authority of the Bible, Copernicus and Galileo dethroned the Earth from
the center of the universe and Darwin showed that there are not fixed species
and that man, instead of being a replica of God, is just a sophisticated
ape.

It has not been comfortable for the Catholic Church to lose her authority
as a source of truth. The Church never accepted being relegated to a second
position. The Roman Church, under the guidance of Pope Pius XI, decided
that she could no longer remain away from the debate of the origin of the
universe. After all, she had the age-old cosmology of the Genesis to defend.

In the 20's a conference on Cosmology was held in the Vatican, in the
Pontificia Academia de Scienza di Roma. The intention was that the Vatican
should have a word in the academic establishment on scientific matters.
The pope Pius XI decided that the Church had also to make science within
the Vatican. Georges Lemaître, a monk with a great knowledge on theology
and mathematics, was designated to study Einstein's and other scientist's
ideas, with the explicit intention of selling the Roman Church's cosmology.

In 1927 Lemaître, inspired by the Bible's cosmology, developed
a theory that the universe began from an explosion of a "primordial
atom" (whatever it is). George Gamow follow suit developing the idea
that all the constituents of the universe have been created in the first
few minutes after the big bang, and Alan Guth, from Cornell University,
authored the inflation theory of the Universe, according to which "the
entire universe is supposed to have grown from an almost infinitesimal
bubble of space, only one trillionth the size of a proton" (apud Herbert
Friedman, "The Astronomer's Universe", 1998). Certainly both
scientists swallowed Lemaître's bait and gave scientific credibility
to the Bible version by elaborating on the beginning of the universe through
a primordial explosion.

Hawking also helped to advance the Bible's Cosmology with his "singularity"
theory. In 1975 he was rewarded by the pope with a medal.

Another scientist that swallowed Lemaître's bait was Bernard Lovell
who, innocently, concluded that the creation of matter, in the big bang,
could only be effective by the power of an external factor, god himself!
He failed to explain how god was created.

Einstein was decidedly against the idea of the Big Bang. His equations
have concluded that the universe had to be either in expansion or in contraction,
but he didn't believe his own equations, because he was a supporter of
a stable vision of the cosmos. He created a "cosmological constant"
(a counter-gravity force) not to abandon his equations. Later he abandoned
this theory.

The impasse between the Big Bang and the steady-state theory was broken
when Hubble found out that the universe is in expansion. Einstein was shocked
by the expanding universe demonstrated by the findings of Edwin Hubble.
Lemaître saw this as a great opportunity and rushed to California.
In the early 1930s, as reported by Timothy Ferris (The Whole Shebang, 1997),
in a lecture in the library of Mt. Wilson observatory offices, Lemaître
declared solemnly to an audience which included Einstein: "In the
beginning of everything we had fireworks of unimaginable beauty. Then there
was the explosion followed by the filling of heavens with smoke. We come
to late to do more than to visualize the splendor of creation's' birthday."
Not even Moses would be so eloquent. Lemaître's oratory was so brilliant
that even Einstein became convinced by this new version of the biblical
cosmology.

Unbelievingly, after resisting for a long time, Einstein, and most of
the scientific establishment, capitulated to the idea of the Big Bang by
the influence of no less than a monk: George Lemaître.

This Catholic monk succeeded in infiltrating into the secular science
the preposterous idea of a Biblical universe being created out of nothing.
By who? By God, naturally! Congratulations to Abée Lemaître.
Once more religion defeated science. Not for long, we hope!

Finally, a quotation from Joseph Silk (COSMIC ENIGMAS, 1994): "In
many respects, the Big Bang is to modern cosmology what mythology was to
the ancients. To believe that we understand the very early Universe, the
first microseconds of cosmic time, requires immense faith in the physicist's
search for the ultimate union of fundamental forces of nature, because
direct evidence is completely lacking."

The very essence of the big bang theory is "FAITH", that is,
religion!